UDW: Summary Day 5 – Thanks!

So Ubuntu Developer Week is over for this year. It’s been amazing as always, just a little bit better. It was just incredible to see 420 people following the sessions at times and so many good questions coming in.

Here’s the summary of the last day:

Translations for developers: Danilo Šegan, David Planella and Martin Pitt gave an almost complete overview over what’s happening in the translations world. Language packs, Launchpad Translations, how to mark strings as translatable, etc. they covered it all. Thanks guys!

GTD for hackers: Lars Wirzenius gave a great session on Getting Things Done. You could tell by the type of questions that there’s a huge interest in getting more things done. Quote: Impatient summary: externalize memory, review external memory regularly, pick the next possible thing to do and do just that.

Fixing an Ubuntu bug using Bazaar: James Westby gave a cool session on how to fix an Ubuntu bug using the Bazaar revision control system. With more and more projects using revision control and better tools it’s more fun to just use Bazaar.

Packaging from scratch: Iain Lane kicked off the session by downloading pdfchain 0.123, a package that does not exist in Ubuntu yet, added a few bits here and there, helped to correct mistakes and gave an outlook on what else to fix in the package.

Hacking Soyuz to get your builds done: William Grant, Michael Nelson and Celso Providelo gave a really nice session about Soyuz, Launchpad’s Build Service. First Michael interviewed William about his first patches to Soyuz then Celso started explaining some of the key pieces of the infrastructure. As William said: “But Launchpad developers are very helpful to new contributors, so they can give you a lot of guidance if you get lost.”, so if you want to help out, check out the log and do it! 🙂

I’d like to take the time to thank everybody who worked on Ubuntu Developer Week to make it happen. There’s been so many contributions, I guess I can’t list them all: the sessions themselves, people organising IRC, we had web banners, we had a very nicely designed brochure, we had a lot of publicity, we had people organising the logs of the sessions, etc etc etc. THANKS EVERYBODY FOR HELPING TO MAKE Ubuntu Developer Week HAPPEN! 🙂

We’ll definitely have another one. If you have great (and maybe a few crazy) ideas for the next one, let me know. 🙂